1y ago

I bought a Surface Pro 4 - Update

So I posted a few weeks ago asking for opinions on the Surface Pro 4, trying to decide if I should pick one up and slap Linux on it.
Opinions were.....mixed.

I got a decent deal on one, and that's partly why it's taken me so long to post an update. It was cheap because the previous buyer had returned it to the seller claiming that there were power issues. The seller said they hadn't encountered said issues in the hour or so of testing they did, and I call fucking bullshit!
Once powered off or restarted it was taking up to 48hrs before it would grace me with booting up. And usable time ranged for 15mins to an hour before system lockup resulting in either a freeze until battery run out, or immediate system shutdown, and another 12-48hrs wait to power it up again. Obviously this is suboptimal.

Part of the issue, possibly unsurprisingly, was windows and the stripped down BIOS. After turning off secure boot, turning off the "battery saver" mode(restricts charging to 50% of total capacity) and scrubbing windows off the drive like a crusty booger...things have improved. I'm still unable to restart the device, restart powers down, but no power up. Wait times to power up again went from probably 36hrs average to 2hrs average, and if I just don't turn it off, the system is stable.

My time with Nobara on the surface has been really enjoyable, everything is just stock, I've not wanted to muck around too much and get attached in case I can't figure out the actual root cause of the power issues.
As such, not really much else to report other than Nobara running well, and pretty much everything running as well or better than when windows was installed. Touch functionality works slightly differently in Nobara than Windows, but that's not really a bother for me.

If any of you greybeard wizards has any ideas on what might be happening with the power cycle issues I'd appreciate some suggestions. I think it may be a battery issue, but I'm waiting on a hot air station to be able to open it up and have a proper look at it's guts. Doesn't seem to have anything to do with temps, that was my first thought but that didn't pan out.

54 comments

Ditch it, the Surface Pro 4’s are cursed via shit manufacturing.
Its screen will fail sooner or later https://flickergate.com/ . I had one, it started flickering after the “extended” warranty. The display is useless now. Nothing fixes it. At first the flicker stopped if something on the screen moved, so I used this https://github.com/Acie1998/Surface-Pro-Screen-Flicker-Solver to mitigate it. But within a day or two it was worse. I tried a reduced refresh rate, but that did not help by then. It quickly got worse when in use, within minutes after a week of the flickering starting. A used one is just pre-accelerated to its demise.
Replacing the screen - even opening the device - is egregiously dangerous because the screen often cracks when taking it apart. Microsoft abs sucks for making a device that can’t last when it clearly should. (Not to say anything about your specific problems! It sounds like the battery needs to be replaced, but it can run without a battery as far as I know so not sure why it can’t power up with it heavily depleted)
Edit: if you’re going to remove the sceeen, replace the battery and replace the screen with a surface pro 5 screen. They sell them. The batteries get fucked quick cause the heat sink cooks them, so it’s prob the battery causing your problems (mine had shit battery life at its end too)
Here is a blurb from Reddit describing what to get (ifixit apparently sells a surface pro 5 screen as well if you want one degree better than direct China): My advice, if you have a Surface Pro 4 with an Samsung Panel is to replace for an LG Screen from Surface Pro 5/6. You need to buy this LCD cable too for that conversion: M1010537-003
You can check in the device manager which LCD panel you have on your Surface
- Noted. Thanks.
- I have one (a friend gave it to when she needed something faster) and the screen works fine. However, the battery is pretty much cooked and due the glued screen it’s a nope for replacing it…
  
  Glad yours is usable still! Mine went from fine to unusably flickering within the span of a week, so it set in fast. I babybabied it too hoping to avoid the issue - I guess I just prolonged it till it microsoft wouldn’t fix it anymore. rip fuck this corpo created e waste shit (I use it as a comp strapped to my TV now)
- Good screen is made by LG, bad by samsung :)
- Is the SP5 working ok?
  
  Yes, it’s recommended to replace the SP4 screen with an SP5 screen - so you can rest easy

Two hours to power on? Did I read this right? What happen during this long power up sequence? Is it stuck on POST, bootloader or kernel load?
- As in it won't post, no power to the screen, keyboard, anything. No fan spin. Regardless of charge level in the battery. And it's more like having to wait two hours before it deigns to respond to pressing the power button.
  Edit: the other possible causes could be a failing power button, or a failing pms/bms or whatever it's using

I have some strange power issues with my laptop that may have a similar cause.
I put an additional drive in my work laptop so I could debian for work without nuking the system drive.
Shutting down usually always works properly but rebooting gets stuck sometimes. It's like it gets to the bottom of the reboot cycle and loses the ability to say "okay boot back up now". On my laptop, it's obvious that it is still on because of the light on the power button. I hold it down for about 12 seconds until it goes off and then I can power it back on.
I wonder if your surface is doing a similar thing where it is still powered on but not booted. You might try hiding the power button down for about 15 seconds and then hitting it again when it's in this state.
- :'( I wish, unfortunately no amount of button holding helps. I've tried all the different button combos to get it to boot. At least the time to reboot is getting shorter. Not usably shorter, but better than several days!

These things are totally unrepairable. Had one at work that needed an NVME upgrade. You have to melt the glue holding the glass screen in place to get to it.
- Seriously? I was looking at a Surface product recently, and it appeared to have an access panel for the NVME drive. I read a ton of complaints about the dimensions of the drive being unusual, but access to it was easy. I don't think I was looking at a Surface pro though.
  If a surface pro wants to be a full OS and not a tablet OS, it should be easy to replace the storage device.
- I am very well aware of the nightmare ahead of me with regards to opening the thing. I'm not even going to attempt it before my new hot air station arrives

I bought my son a used Surface Pro 4 for schoolwork. Luckily we haven't run into many problems, but there is a known problem where the processor still runs the battery dead when it's shut off. You're actually better off using standby.
If he runs the battery dead, we can plug it in and it will boot, but shortly die afterwards. But if we wait 15 minutes to charge it a little, it stays on as long as we want it to.

I work with a company who distributes a mix of surface pro and Lenovo Yoga laptops. Right now they're on Surface pro 7s.
I've yet to hear anything good about them over the years and models we've handed out. Most of the guys with them call us back to get a Yoga instead.
- With the stock windows install I'd agree, after slapping Linux on this bad boy slap no issues....well...other than the ones that I already mentioned
- Microsoft has a terrible track record with hardware.
  About the only hardware they’ve ever sold that didn’t crap the bed was the Xbox, Xbox one, and Xbox series whatever the fuck.
  The 360 would cook itself, instead of fixing it, they added red LEDs to tell you it was fucked. The windows phones were unresponsive and unimpressive garbage, and every tablet they’ve made has been mired in various hardware and screen issues.
  It’s almost like a software company that has a business model that depends on selling people regular updates, can’t get its head around the idea that hardware should just work for the task it’s designed to do. They want you to buy a new tablet every year or two, because it makes them money. They don’t really care if the battery is going to cook itself in 5 years, when the plan is you’ll buy a new device in 2 years, because you really need to edit PowerPoint(tm) presentations while on the train and with a touchscreen.
  
  Their mice and joysticks used to be top notch.

I'm gonna highjack this post to ask what's a good lightweight DE for touchscreen devices?
My dad is currently using my old Surface Pro 3 I slapped Ubuntu LTS on, Gnome works great for touch but it's abit sluggish on the hardware. Also I couldn't get touch screen scrolling to work on Firefox.
- Also I couldn’t get touch screen scrolling to work on Firefox.
  Are you using wayland or X11? If it's wayland, are firefox running under native wayland mode, or xwayland mode (check about:support to confirm).
  
  No idea, It uses whatever Ubuntu 22 defaulted to I believe.
  I'll check next time I can, Thank you.
  
  I've recently switched to pop_os so I'm a bit new. I tried a few different things to get firefox to stop using xwayland. I want it to use wayland to actually utilize accelerated video decode.
  I added a MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 variable to my ~/.profile, and I tried adding this and some additional environment variables to the .desktop file that launches firefox. I can't find the post or the file anymore, I just remember at least one variable was not firefox specific, so it was suggested to launch firefox in an environment with those variables set, to prevent messing with other things. Do you have any other ideas on what to check to get firefox to actually run in wayland?
- I would highly recommend the stock Nobara install, it's running Gnome with custom settings.
  Https://nobaraproject.org
  Comes preinstalled with the linux-surface kernel extensions.
- Haven't tried it yet, but Plasma Mobile?

Damn that sounds like a nightmare device.
Got an Acer chromebook once, wanted to install coreboot and Linux. Found out they have nearly no replacement parts, and I was not able to open that thing up.
Sent it back as quick as possible.
- I spent about £80 on it, can't remember exactly. And it was a "no givesies backsies" sale.
- Yeah, Acer is complete junk. Shame they bought gateway and skull fucked that brand into the ground.

You couldn't pay me to use this...
- I mean....if I had enough money I'm pretty sure I could....

Is there touch screen? If so how does it work on linux?
- It has a touchscreen, and it works quite well on Nobara. Nobara is a Fedora fork with Surface kernel mods to get most/all of the extra stuff working.
- I just got a thinkpad x1 yoga gen 4 with a touchscreen. Installed Ubuntu 23.10 and Im loving it, works well with touch. Although I only use touch with the lenovo pen in xournal++ for taking notes in some subjects. And monument valley.

I've been deploying and servicing Surface Pro's since the Pro 3, but now that I really think about it, I've never actually handled a Pro 4, just everything else in between.
Through all the comments I've noticed you don't appear to have tried the "hard reset" procedure yet? Any time our Surfaces have gotten funky, a hard reset usually kicks them in the butt for a few months until another wonky issue crops up. Your delay to power on sounds just like some of the wonkyness I've experienced but moved on from after 15 seconds of button presses. Hold power and volume up for 15 seconds.
I still have my Pro 3, I also have a Pro 5 and Pro 7. My Pro 3 still gets 6.5 hours on the battery, they're not without their problems but it's often how you treat them.
I've sold and supported hundreds. I've only had one come back after someone was unable to follow my instructions above. I was able to perform the above and resold it the next day.
- I appreciate the suggestion, but that was quite literally the first thing I tried. The first time it wouldn't turn on I tried pwr&v+ for 90 seconds, then either ctr+alt+b or ctr+sft+b can't recall what one it was, then alternating between v+ and v- in quick succession, all those are meant to be ways to hard reset/virtual battery disconnect

I don't remember which Surface I have, but power issues are the biggest bugbear that have followed me with it the entire time I've had it. Firstly chargers for the thing are really fucking sketchy - if it's not in basically perfect, out-of-the-box condition it simply refuses to connect. And even if the little indicator light turns on that doesn't mean that the bios "sees" it, which is pretty annoying.
Lately it's been doing this thing where when I try to wake it up from sleep it takes about a full minute to turn the screen on. This wasn't an issue until like a week ago, I've tried updating everything, reverting back to windows/stock settings - nothing.
Nowadays my surface is just a second screen on my desk that I use to run Stremio, because it just can't handle anything else - and this is after me being pretty positive on it for most of the time I've had it. I guess I've had it for a few years, but damn if it wasn't such a compact design I could probably swap out the power supply or something.

Surfaces are notoriously hard to repair so good luck
- I mean, if I fuck it up irreparably...I'm out less than £100. I spend that taking my wife out on a date night. I bought it to play around with. It's just a bit more of an involved game than I had thought I'd bought a ticket for...

I have a surface go 3 and it actually works pretty well, especially with the custom linux-surface kernel.
- Other than the weirdness with power cycling, the thing's is a pleasure to use. I run a flavour of Arch(btw) on my desktop now, but for quite awhile I used Fedora so Nobara feels comfortable. Just wanna figure out the weirdness so I can do stuff like restart the damn thing so flatpack updates work properly.

Mine after one hour of usage starts flickering the screen...

If you're having power on issues, I would make sure you are using a standalone power brick. I've used a Surface Pro for work and I've found that sometimes when connected to the docking station, it wouldn't power on. When connected to a standalone power brick it usually would. For a standalone power brick, I've used both the one that came with the Surface and also a 65W USB-C adapter with a USB-C to Surface per cable.
- I'm using an official stand alone power brick.

I also had people not praising them at work .
Back then it was Surface Pro 8s and Surface Book 3s They throttled a lot due to temp issues.
- All I know is that I bought my wife a Surface Pro 3 and it had to be replaced TWICE for the same exact issue. One of the times I was at the Microsoft store I even overheard another person with the same issue.

I owned a surface back during the 2014 Microsoft hype campaign, the absolute garbage windows 8 RT experience forever made me hate any and all laptops with surface in its name..

54 comments